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General discussion

I had to laugh - public health problem

Jan 9, 2015 6:13PM PST

I read an article today about a "public health problem" in the US.

It seems that death from firearm violence in the US, on the increase year after year, is a health and safety problem.

ROFL

More Americans 'will die from guns than cars' in 2015

The GOOD news is that death from RTA in the US is down, and is in long term decline. In fact, by 2015, you are more likely to be shot to death than to die in a car traffic accident.

So, good improvement there.

The authors of the report concluded that "further research on the nature and prevention of firearm violence is sorely needed" and that "evidence-based interventions may lead to substantial reductions in death and disability from this important public health problem".

Not just a public health problem, but an important public health problem.

So, death by shooting is a public health problem, much like broken sewers, poor hygiene, bird flu, etc.

Mark

Discussion is locked

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I'd certainly not laugh
Jan 9, 2015 7:17PM PST

and I don't think the comparison is a fair one. Automobiles versus guns? What I'd rather see is stats involving deaths during criminal activity. We could compare death/injury from auto accidents versus gun accidents and I'd suspect cars would come out being the more deadly of the two.

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RE: Automobiles versus guns?
Jan 9, 2015 8:44PM PST

Get in the wayback machine and check some of the threads in SE...someone brings up death by guns...automobiles are mentioned in many of the responses.

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So what...
Jan 9, 2015 10:19PM PST

and your take?

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RE; and your take?
Jan 9, 2015 10:35PM PST

MY take on?

comparing automobiles deaths to gun deaths?

Straw dog?

An automobile was built for transportation...a gun was made to intimidate, wound or kill.

Isn't the ROFL part of the OP about gun deaths being classed as an "important public health problem"?

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Laughing can mean either not taking something seriously
Jan 9, 2015 11:52PM PST

or having a perverse idea of what is funny. Frankly, however, I don't imagine that was the intention of the OP. I believe it was pointing to an understatement of a problem and with that I can agree. Sometimes writers do use odd language as well as odd comparisons. All that seems to do is detract from constructive discussion and lead people to veer from it. Of course I can believe that news writers aren't in the business of being helpful to solve problems as they'd have little to sell if everything was going well. As for the topic of shooting deaths, I'd say we need to discuss it entirely separately from that of pure accidents those that come about due to "natural" causes. For shooting deaths, we approach it from the criminal side. Criminals should not have ready access to criminal tools. Guns are a criminal tool. Now someone needs to tell me how we can legislate that without imposing on non-criminals.

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RE;Laughing can mean either not taking something seriously
Jan 10, 2015 5:49AM PST
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I see
Jan 10, 2015 4:31AM PST

you recognised the irony in my post.

I just have no comprehension of a culture that accepts guns as a way of life, and accepts the consequences so readily.

Did you also see in the article that there are nearly as many civilian firearms as (the 320m population) people in the US.

I cannot help but compare gun deaths, (total of any kind), in the US with that in the UK

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compare/192/total_number_of_gun_deaths/194

32,163 against 146 in 2011. The UK figure is less than one half percent of the US figure.

The UK population is around 60m

Mark

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Violent Crime in UK is 800% Higher than in USA
Jan 10, 2015 6:30AM PST
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/09/11/uk-violent-crime-rate-eight-times-higher-than-the-us/

"According to the FBI, there were 1.2 million violent crimes committed in the US during 2011. FBI — Violent Crime

According to the UK government, there were 1.94 million violent crimes in the UK during 2011. www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_296191.pdf

There are almost exactly five times as many people in the US as in the UK - 314 million vs. 63 million. The violent crime rate in the UK is 3,100 per 100,000, and in the US it is 380 per 100,000 population.

Brits are eight times more likely to be victims of violent crime than Americans."


More LOL.
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Did you read any of the comments?
Jan 10, 2015 5:37PM PST
Bill Dawson says:

"Interesting, and since I was among other things, a fact checker at GE-especially of government data sets- I dug into these reports. It appears to me that the two data sets (FBI and UK gov) are really not comparable and are being misread by Steven Goddard. In other words the FBI's categories for violent crime include only...

In the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, violent crime is composed of four offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault

Whereas the UK database includes...

Violent crime covers a wide range of offences, from minor assaults such as pushing and shoving that result in no physical harm through to serious incidents of wounding and murder
"

I haven't checked either of these claims, (from this Steven Goddard or this Bill Dawson). Did you?

Mark
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I seriously doubt the validity of your statistic about 800%.
Jan 14, 2015 9:48AM PST
Britain is so unsafe a nation that only 643 are murdered there every year versus 14827 for the US. Mind you the US is bigger, let's say it's 5 times bigger. That would make the statistics 3215 to 14,827 for equally sized populations. The US is 9 times the size of Canada, so their statistics leap to an enormous 4,967.when population size is controlled for.

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/United-Kingdom/United-States/Crime
A good comparison UK to US. It certainly doesn't say anything about 800% more in any category, though there are categories where the UK comes out ahead. Not in the area of the number of people incarcerated though, where the US is number 1 with several bullets, actually make that incessant gunfire. The accidental death toll from firearms in the US is way beyond most countries in the world except some areas of Africa where there is civil unrest.

Areas where the UK exceeds US crime rates. Software piracy (and the cost of software is higher there than in the US). Opiate use 0.9% in UK vs 0.57% in US. But opiates are available on prescription in the UK so it isn't nearly such a harmful or crime producing situation. Junkies don't have to commit crimes to score fixes, though they do if they want more than a maintenance dose. And for some reason people in the UK report feeling less safe despite all the statistics contradicting this perception, and Americans feel more safe, despite all the statistics contradicting this perception.

With regard to capital punishment, the statistic is peculiar. the Year 2014 is taken as the nominal maximum year. The US is ranked 2014, i.e. top of the charts along with those lovely vacation spots and paragons of restraint, Saudi Arabia Somalia China and Iran. Everybody else has a reduced prorated number. The UK is 1953, except the UK doesn't have capital punishment so I don't understand how the statistic really works.

The biggest problem with NationMaster however is that in many categories, there are no US statistics, so Scotland comes out tops for physical assaults, but the US appears nowhere because there are no national statistics. See the real trouble with this statistic thing is that most nations collect statistics nationally, but the US does it by state, and then doesn't bother to actually collate those findings and publish them or at least it pretends not to. Ever wonder why? If they were good statistics, you can be sure that any US Administration Liberal or Conservative would be trumpetting them to the skies. I think we can all agree that the FBI has the statistics, and has done the number crunching, but somebody somewhere doesn't like the figures, and it isn't just the Obama Administration.

So who's safe and who's unsafe is fairly easily established, assuming one can read. I'd suggest that there is so little homicide in the UK that the police are spending their time further down the criminal food chain on other forms of crime.

Ted
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I gather that this discussion grew out of a Piers Morgan
Jan 15, 2015 9:32AM PST

piece where he was complaining about the appalling rate of gun deaths in the US. There is no quarreling with the fact that 14,000+ people were killed both intentionally, unintentionally, and through deliberate acts of suicide by gun in the US in 2012. That's what the FBI statistic shows. There is also no way to make that look better by messing with or distorting the statistics of other countries. The discussion below is directly to this point:

http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checking-ben-swann-is-the-uk-really-5-times-more-violent-than-the-us/

"What Swann either doesn't know, or simply doesn't bother to tell his viewers, is that the definitions for "violent crime" are very different in the US and Britain, and the methodologies of the two statistics he cites are also different. (He probably simply doesn't realize this: it appears that he lifted his data wholesale from a story in the Daily Mail, without checking it-something you might expect a fact checker to have done.)

"First, it should be noted that the figures Swann gives are out of date: in 2010, according to the FBI, the reported rate of violent crime in the US was 403 incidents per 100,000 people-the 466 figure comes from 2007. Second, and more importantly, the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports defines a "violent crime" as one of four specific offenses: murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.

'The British Home Office, by contrast, has a substantially different definition of violent crime. The British definition includes all "crimes against the person," including simple assaults, all robberies, and all "sexual offenses," as opposed to the FBI, which only counts aggravated assaults and "forcible rapes."

'When you look at how this changes the meaning of "violent crime," it becomes clear how misleading it is to compare rates of violent crime in the US and the UK. You're simply comparing two different sets of crimes. In 2009/10, for instance (annual data is from September to September), British police recorded 871,712 crimes against persons, 54,509 sexual offenses, and 75,101 robberies in England and Wales. Based on the 2010 population of 55.6 million, this gives a staggeringly high violent crime rate of 1,797 offenses per 100,00 people.

'But of the 871,000 crimes against the person, less than half (401,000) involved any actual injury. The remainder were mostly crimes like simple assault without injury, harassment, "possession of an article with a blade or point," and causing "public fear, alarm, or distress." And of the 54,000 sexual offenses, only a quarter (15,000) were rapes. This makes it abundantly clear that the naive comparison of crime rates either wildly overstates the amount of violence in the UK or wildly understates it in the US.

'Due to fundamental differences in how crime is recorded and categorized, it's impossible to compute exactly what the British violent crime rate would be if it were calculated the way the FBI does it, but if we must compare the two, my best estimate would be something like 776 violent crimes per 100,000 people. While this is still substantially higher than the rate in the United States, it's nowhere near the 2,034 cited by Swann and the Mail. [Elsewhere I noted that statistics for Assaults were not available in the sources I had found for US crime, primarily because they are adjudicated at the State and local level and the statistics aren't reported in the same way by US officials.]

"America has a much higher murder rate than other OECD countries, including Great Britain.

"Besides the misleading data Swann used, it's interesting to note the statistics he didn't give you. For instance, Swann correctly pointed out that it is no surprise the UK has fewer shooting deaths than the US, since handguns are almost totally banned. But he neglects to mention that Britain doesn't just have fewer gun-related homicides-it has a dramatically lower murder rate all around. In 2010, the US had an average murder rate of 4.8 murders per 100,000 people-4 times higher than the UK's rate of 1.2 per 100,000, and, coincidentally, the exact opposite of the impression that Swann gives viewers.' "

So this "fact checker" Ben Swann, who isn't the one who fabricated the 800% figure (his was 500%), has himself vastly over counted the UK crime rate and the murder rate. And the skeptical libertarian who wrote the blog says he's a libertarian or so he claims, meaning despite his criticism of Swann, he doesn't really want to find results which will indicate that a form of government he despises, i.e. a socially active one like Britain's produces better, safer conditions for all of the people of Britain, and better outcomes than are demonstrable in the US.

Now this whole issue was raised in order to point the finger at Britain in order to make Americans, or at least some Americans like the original poster feel better about things in the US or superior to somebody. else A far larger issue is the underlying fear and discomfort that Americans seem to feel about their own safety which gives rise to these exercises in whistling in the dark and grossly distorting the figures. Continuing to refuse to even look at the issue of how seriously the ownership of guns by roughly 1/3 of the public has become an issue which affects the Health of 100% of the Nation, i.e. it has indeed become a Public Health issue, seems awfully stupid. I don't know where gun deaths come in the over-all scheme of deaths in the US, but it seems likely that it ends the lives of children and adolescents and young adults more frequently than any disease, infectious or otherwise, and possibly more than traffic accidents. There aren't a lot of old people being shot unless there are unreported clashes of streetgangs of Pensioners fighting it out in alleys. There are certainly a lot of younger ones being killed by guns.

http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa-cause-of-death-by-age-and-gender

Homicide is the 6th highest cause of death in the 0-14 year old population, the 4th highest in the 15-24 age group, and the 4th largest in the 25 to 34 age group. Only then does it drop precipitately. Children and young adults are killed disproportionately by guns over any other age group. In any other country that would be a scandal and a source for outcry. In the United States it is sloughed off as "The price of freedom", as those who continue to distort the reasoning behind the 2nd Amendment insist. I'd be inclined to call it a tax on the US populace levied by gun manufacturers and ammunition manufacturers and paid for in the lives of America's children. I'd also call it grotesque and indefensible. Only Poisoning, Suicide and Road Traffic Accidents come higher on the list for that group.

Ted

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police per 100,000 population
Jan 10, 2015 7:49AM PST
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Do you have it for France?
Jan 10, 2015 8:00AM PST
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yep
Jan 10, 2015 9:09AM PST

France 299.2 police per 100,000 persons.

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(NT) Figured it may be higher. Thanks.
Jan 10, 2015 9:27AM PST
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Re: more danger
Jan 10, 2015 7:54PM PST

Given the figures given by Mark (146 versus 32,163) my conclusion is that more police means less armed kills. It's not true, of course, but it's more true than your statement.

Did you notice that the UK Prime Minister is guarded by one policeman in front of Downing Street 10: http://www.youropi.com/nl/londen/locations/10-downing-street-1342. Compare that with the situation around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest to guard the President of the USA.

Obviously, there's much more danger in the USA. Or do you think it's just a Democratic hobby to spend all that money for nothing, and the Republicans will go back to one lonely policeman? I don't.

Kees

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In what way is that accurate?
Jan 10, 2015 11:21PM PST
"Did you notice that the UK Prime Minister is guarded by one policeman in front of Downing Street 10: http://www.youropi.com/nl/londen/locations/10-downing-street-1342. Compare that with the situation around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest to guard the President of the USA."

first, I said nothing about "armed kills" and I'm not even sure if you are speaking of police officer killings or criminal killings, you were unclear on that.

Second, do you think it would be appropriate for me to compare Boehner's (speaker of House) lower police protection detail to that provided the royal family in UK? Your comparison is non equitable.

Also the police around the white house is like guards around Parliament and Buckingham Palace, they aren't there just for one person. They are location police as opposed to personal body guards such as the SS.

As for what constitutes "violent crimes" in UK, they are the ones who made such determinations, not me. Blame me for taking them at their word? Instead blame them for considering a shove or push to be equal to bodily injuries or death.

Also take into consideration the matter of violence by race. The British live in what I'd call "Whitelandia" where 87-89% are white and asian (1-2%) typically the least criminal elements in a society. Their black population is under 5%, actually about 3% black and 2% mixed.


The US has 9% identified as fully African American (blacks) and lesser amount who are mixed.

If you remove all the violent crime statistics done by blacks from both countries, then you will discover there is a greater amount of white initiated crime in UK than in the USA. In fact, last time I checked, blacks were responsible for 48% of all violent crimes in America. It might not be politically correct in the eyes of some to point those facts out, but I don't deal in politically expedient, preferring the truth instead.
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Re: blacks
Jan 11, 2015 2:51AM PST

Isn't it time then for a small change in the Constitution: only whites (and maybe Hispanics, that's to be discussed) are allowed to have guns. After all, that was how it was when the Constitution was made: all blacks still were (sorry to use the word) slaves. I can't imagine slaves were allowed to have guns like their (sorry to use the word) masters.

Kees

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I suspect the limitation was due to citizenship
Jan 11, 2015 5:20AM PST

Slaves weren't citizens. There were "freemen" who were black but that goes back to colonial times where there was little consistency among and between the laws. As best I can find, there were times when guns were kept in controlled area for use as needed. Guns were only to be dispensed to the trusted. The untrusted included black persons, indians (Native Americans) and Catholics. None of these would be issued a gun. It wasn't just race.

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guns vs automobiles
Jan 10, 2015 7:26AM PST
"An automobile was built for transportation...a gun was made to intimidate, wound or kill."

We had transportation. Horses and carriages. So, automobile wasn't primarily built for transportation, but as a toy for the wealthy. A gun was made for the same reason as bow and arrows, spears, for to hunt, to defend oneself, fight for oneself "en masse" aka war, dissuade tyranny from the ruling class, give Liberals something else to moan and groan about.
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RE: A gun was made for the same reason as bow and arrows,
Jan 10, 2015 11:30AM PST
A gun was made for the same reason as bow and arrows, spears, for to hunt, to defend oneself, fight for oneself "en masse" aka war, dissuade tyranny from the ruling class, give Liberals something else to moan and groan about.

OR as a once great man said

a gun was made to intimidate, wound or kill. (notice I didn't say to kill what)

We had transportation. Horses and carriages. So, automobile wasn't primarily built for transportation, but as a toy for the wealthy.

The Amish still do.


So Henry Ford built the FIRST Moving Assembly line to build TOYS?

It wasn't a car factory...it was Santas workshop.

It wasn't expensive transportation...it was an expensive toy that was used for transportation.

Seems like you're in favour of going back to the horse and buggy, yet you don't want to go back to the bow and arrow.
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There's always been a tug o' war
Jan 10, 2015 6:09PM PST

between the strong and stronger. The loser goes back to the training table. I've not found any youtubes of early man using sticks and rocks to hunt and defend their caves but I suspect they faced plenty of situations they couldn't talk their way out of. Sticks and rocks gave way to other tools and weapons designed for the same purposes. There are still a few primitive peoples who hunt for food and don't know what a can opener is. Modern societies no longer rely on stalking prey to eat but human stalkers still exist and they prey on each other for different reasons. We call these people criminals. If you can formulate a drug that can block criminal mentality and figure out a way to universally administer it, I think you'd see a lot of guns and other weapons be melted down for other use.

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(NT) IMO 'made me laugh' was ironic, Steven.
Jan 12, 2015 7:30AM PST
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consider though
Jan 10, 2015 6:24AM PST

that a large number of those who died by gunfire, since most weren't accidents, like what happens with automobiles, saved law enforcement the cost of prosecutions, incarcerations, and man of the ones who died helped clean up America's crime scene a bit more.

How about those knife crimes?

http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=1323

Hey, maybe "Knife Control Laws" will save them?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1546085/The-vagaries-of-UK-knife-crime-statistics.html

"The Criminal Justice Act 1988 contained a list of prohibited martial arts-style weapons and made it an offence to carry an article with a blade or sharp point in a public place. The Offensive Weapons Act 1996 made it illegal to sell knives to children under 16. The Knives Act 1997 prohibited the marketing of combat knives."

LOL

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RE: Hey, maybe "Knife Control Laws" will save them? LOL
Jan 10, 2015 11:56AM PST
The Criminal Justice Act 1988 contained a list of prohibited martial arts-style weapons and made it an offence to carry an article with a blade or sharp point in a public place. The Offensive Weapons Act 1996 made it illegal to sell knives to children under 16. The Knives Act 1997 prohibited the marketing of combat knives."

Terrible isn't it....now you can't even get on a plane with a pen knife in America....
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So, quit flying
Jan 10, 2015 11:26PM PST

I don't intend to fly anywhere again till the foolishness at the airports is ended. It saddens me that too many Americans seem not to care enough to boycott the industry for the sake of freedom. That's the choice they've made, but it's not my choice.

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(NT) I guess you're grounded, would you go on a zipline?
Jan 12, 2015 11:30AM PST
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would you take a long walk
Jan 12, 2015 6:11PM PST

on a short pier?

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After you.
Jan 12, 2015 7:22PM PST

Canadians are SO polite.

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RE: saved law enforcement
Jan 10, 2015 1:01PM PST